The day lengthens, the cold strengthens

After an extraordinary mild spell that saw me outdoors a few times gardening and potting up at the table on the terrace, we’ve had a couple of sharp overnight frosts that have not lifted from shaded ground.  Still, on the good days, some dozens of penstemon cuttings have found their way into pots, and I’m hoping that they’ll survive outside in cold frames.  They are incredibly rewarding plants, striking easily from cuttings and flowering profusely over a long season.  I was far less successful at growing them from seed, though, and am not sure that I’ve actually seen a flower from any of the seedlings.  All but one of the autumn’s surviving New Guinea busy lizzie cuttings are now also potted up and adorning the kitchen window ledge, despite attracting whitefly.  On a mild day I took them outside for a dose of insecticide.  Much as I’d love to be an organic gardener, life’s too short: I’m sparing with pesticides, but do not shrink entirely from using them – and slug pellets in particular.

We underwent ordeal by IKEA on Monday.  The experience is more bearable on a weekday during working hours, but the place was still quite busy.  We’ve also been haunting the shops and the internet in search of new linen for our IKEA bed, and have done quite nicely, we think, in the sales at a local department store.  M&S was a less wonderful experience.  We did a run to its neighbour, the tip, on Friday with a lot of rubbish turned out from the spare bedroom and the attic, and had to queue for ages in the traffic jam that permanently afflicts the increasingly retail-oriented industrial estate.  Getting in and out of the tip is bad enough, but the M&S car park is just awful.  It is going to be hell out there when the new supermarket opens.  Oh well, we survived with nothing worse than briefly raised blood pressure.  The internet was almost as frustrating: one lot of linen arrived bearing scant resemblance to the description on-line, and is on its way back.  I hope the duvet, due tomorrow, is better.

Nice convivial evening yesterday: a surprise dinner gathering at a nearby hostelry for an old friend, who was celebrating his 50^th birthday.  He and I met some time around his 22^nd, when he was lodging with a then neighbour of mine.  His girlfriend visited from Surrey at weekends.  Married 25 years, they now have five daughters and farm a handful of beautiful acres in East Sussex.  I had been expecting to see another couple from those early days, but learned last night that the husband has just come out of hospital after an unexplained collapse just before Christmas.  Of the nine of us neighbours who used to knock around together in those days, the married survivors are still married to each other, and have produced a total of 13 kids.  One of the chaps died a couple of years ago, and it has recently been touch and go for another.  And I’m by far the oldest of the nine.  I hate these intimations of mortality.